The painting this church was built for is in Madrid. Raphael delivered it for the high altar in time for Holy Week in 1517: Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary, known everywhere as the Spasimo di Sicilia, the Virgin buckling as her son goes down under the cross. Work had started in 1509 under a bull from Julius II, promoted by the Palermo jurist Jacopo de Basilicò to carry out the will of his wife Eulalia Rosolmini. The church was finished, the monastery never was: the money ran out and, with the Turkish threat, the stone went into the city walls.
What to see
The central nave has no roof. The vault came down in the middle of the eighteenth century and nobody rebuilt it, so you walk into a tall, bare late Gothic of Spanish stamp, the ribs of the apses still in place and open sky where the ceiling should be. The painter Giovan Battista Carini had already recorded that image in a view of 1836, when the floor was rubble.
The rest is a list of the other lives of the same building. In 1582 Marcantonio Colonna had Torquato Tasso's Aminta staged here: it became the first public theatre in the city. The plague of 1624 turned it into a lazaretto, then came the granary and the warehouses. From 1886 to 1985 it was the Umberto I hospital, and the wards ate into the side aisles; one of the two domed chapels was pulled down. Of Raphael's panel, sold in 1661 to Philip IV of Spain, only the memory is left here, along with some twenty old copies scattered around Sicily. The marble altar that framed it was carved by Antonello Gagini.
Visiting
We are in the Kalsa, one of the oldest quarters of Palermo, a few minutes on foot from Piazza Marina and the Gancia: Via dello Spasimo ends at the entrance. Left as a rubbish dump after the war, the complex reopened on 25 July 1995 with Giovanni Sollima's concert Spasimo. Since 1997 the rooms of the former hospital have housed the Brass Group Foundation, the jazz museum and the music school, while the nave is used for concerts, exhibitions and plays. Half an hour covers the church and the rooms around it, but the place invites you to sit down.
Our editors' tip
We go towards sunset, when the light comes in sideways from above and the walls turn from grey to ochre, and we check the Brass Group calendar first: hearing a double bass in a church without a roof is worth more than any wall label. To close the circle, look afterwards in the Diocesan Museum for Antonello Gagini's relief of the same scene.